The Show-Woman

Suzan-Lori Parks’s idea for the largest theatre collaboration ever.

Down in the gray-green gloom of the New York City subway system, anything can happen, and frequently does. A bit of hucksterism. Alms for the poor. Sometimes, even unsuspecting critics have to field questions from that rarest of birds, the black female playwright. Late one night in 1987, on the way home from an event at Franklin Furnace, an avant-garde arts center, the writer and theatre critic Alisa Solomon was riding the subway, minding her own business, when a young black woman approached her. “I saw you at the theatre, so I was kinda hoping I could ask you a question,” she said, and sat down next to Solomon, who described the encounter in the Village Voice two years later. The woman leaned in “uncomfortably close,” before adding, “I’m trying to ask anyone who might know. I’m a playwright. Do you know where I can send my scripts? They’re kind of unconventional.”

That young woman—Suzan-Lori Parks—has since become renowned for her audacity, both on the page and in the world. The author of nine full-length plays, most of which are taught at drama schools across the country, and one of the founders of a wave of multilayered, historically aware, and linguistically complicated theatre, she aims to defeat what she calls “the Theatre of Schmaltz”—“the play-as-wrapping-paper-version-of-hot-newspaper-headline.” Parks was the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama—for her 2001 play, “Topdog / Underdog”—after having been short-listed for “In the Blood,” her 1999 reimagining of “The Scarlet Letter.” A writer who crosses cultural boundaries, as well as social ones, she has had her work produced everywhere, from the smallest avant-garde stages to Broadway. Her voice is both idiosyncratic and eerily familiar, one of few in the popular theatre to fully exploit the power of spoken black English. (A typical passage from one of her plays reads like this: “In my day my motherud say 16:15 and there wernt no question that it was 16:15 her time. Thuh time helpin tuh tell you where you oughta be where you oughta be lookin and whatcha oughta be lookin at.”)

Perhaps Parks’s willingness to, as she might put it, “show her ass” without apology is something she picked up from one of her heroes, the singer Josephine Baker, whose famous attitude she wrote about in a 1995 essay:

Legend has it that when Josephine Baker hit Paris in the ’20s, she “just wiggled her fanny and all the French fell in love with her.” . . . [But] there was a hell of a lot behind that wiggling bottom. Check it: Baker was from America and left it; African-Americans are on the bottom of the heap in America; we are at the bottom on the bottom, practically the bottom itself, and Baker rose to the top by shaking her bottom.

Like Baker, Parks, who was nicknamed LedgeButt as a child, believes in making use of what you’ve got, even if all you’ve got is a belief in yourself. Much in demand as a kind of inspirational speaker on the college lecture circuit, she told me last winter, “I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are.”

In September, she taught a master class in drama at Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago. Seated before a small crowd of future playwrights, in an army-green miniskirt, Parks summed up her philosophy this way: “The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come.” She paused. “Faith is the big deal,” she said.

Parks’s faith in her most ambitious project to date, “365 Days / 365 Plays,” was the driving force behind a meeting that she called one morning last January. The project, a yearlong, nationwide staging of a series of very short plays that Parks wrote in the course of a year, will launch on November 13th, and will involve nearly seven hundred theatres, in more than thirty cities; back in January, however, it was still in the early stages of development.

As the forty-two-year-old Parks walked toward the Cow’s End, a two-story coffeehouse on Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, where she has lived for the past six years, she seemed entirely unaware of the soccer moms and skateboarders pausing to take in the sight of her. It was hard to tell what caught their attention most: her nearly waist-length dreadlocks, her mink-colored face with its generous mouth, wide nose, and large brown eyes, or her big hoop earrings and black, calf-high motorcycle boots. Trailed by Bonnie Metzgar, the associate artistic director of Denver’s Curious Theatre, and Ben Cameron, then the executive director of the Theatre Communications Group, which publishes her plays, Parks took a seat at a battered table in the coffeehouse’s atrium and began to explain the genesis of “365 Days / 365 Plays.” Metzgar had already agreed to be a producer of the project. She and Parks hoped that Cameron, given his expertise in the labyrinthine world of arts funding, would offer some help or advice.

In the theatre, seduction is everything. As Parks spoke, she dropped in improvised bits of girlish business—her face taking on a deliberate vagueness of expression as she tied and untied her dreadlocks or stared softly out into space—which made the conversation look and sound not unlike a play written by Suzan-Lori Parks:

PARKS: We have this whole spiel thing we do. O.K., right, so—

CAMERON: Is this like “The Producers”? Are you two like Nathan Lane and—

PARKS: No, I’m not like Nathan Lane. I’m the girl in the white dress.

CAMERON: Uma Thurman.

PARKS: Right, right. I sit on the piano or something and go, “Come up and see me sometime,” or whatever she says. Anyway, about three years ago I was hanging around doing nothing and I said to Paul, my husband, “Gosh, you know, I should write a play. I’m going to write a play a day for a whole year.” And I started laughing, which is always a good sign that I’m possessed by an evil demon. And he said, “Well, you know, that would be cool.” And I said, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah, that would be cool.” So I said, “O.K., I’ll start in January,” and then I thought, No! I’ll start right now. It was the thirteenth of November, the eleventh or twelfth, whatever day it was. So I ran upstairs and I began. And I kept going, through whatever I was doing. I went on a book tour, we might have opened a play—I don’t know what we were doing. “Topdog” opened in London. . . .

METZGAR: We went to war.

PARKS: Right, we went to war. Well, we didn’t go, but we sent some flunkies to do the business.

CAMERON: They’re still there.

PARKS: Right. We opened “Topdog” in London; various people died, like Gregory Hines and some of the flunkies. And all along I was writing a play every day, whatever happened. Whether I was busy or not, whether it was good or not, whether it was convenient or not. Whatever happened. And it became this prayer, almost. To theatre. To life. To the art process, the process of making art and being alive. It sort of took over my whole year. . . . Sometimes I would write it in the security line at the airport, you know? . . . A lot of them were written in hotels. . . . I didn’t limit the time. I sat down and did it and then kind of went on with the day. And then I was finished and I was very proud of myself. And I basically put it in this drawer and didn’t think about it too much afterward. . . . And then comes Bonnie Metzgar, and we’re hanging out in Denver, blah-blah-blah—and I was just floored by her directing. And she said, “What are you doing? What are those plays doing? Where are the rest of the plays?” I said, “They’re sitting in a drawer,” whatever. But she said, “No, no, we should do them.” And I’m, like, “Yeah, yeah.” But she goes, “Noooo!” And eventually we decided that this was what we should do: a seven-city simultaneous world première of the plays. We’d have hub theatres, and we’d have each hub theatre reaching out to theatres in that city, and it’s this seven-city simultaneous thing.

METZGAR: And Suzan and I will try to get out the word so that school groups and libraries—

PARKS: Colleges, universities.

METZGAR: Right. Theatre groups, museums, whatever places have—

PARKS: Theatre groups that do plays in languages other than English.

METZGAR: Right.

PARKS: They can translate them if they want. Do it in Spanish, do it in Tagalog. Go for it.

METZGAR: And hopefully some theatre companies will say, “I’m going to do it for free at noon at Grand Central station.” And some places will say, “We’re going to do it like a prayer in the lobby before the show.” So everyone will do it differently, and hopefully some people will say, “I’m going to do it mainstage at the opera house.” And that diversity is as much a celebration of the breadth of the community as it is of the different kinds of plays they’re doing. The goal is to have the largest shared première ever in the history of anything. And possibly the largest art collaboration of any kind. That’s the potential.

Parks’s Zen-like, sometimes distracted charm (she is a devoted practitioner of Ashtanga yoga) was the perfect counterpart to Metzgar’s businesslike focus. After Cameron had laid out what he saw as the possibilities for funding—or the lack thereof—Metzgar turned to him. “We really feel like if there’s anyone who can hear this kind of idea and help us to make it into reality, then it would be you,” she said.

“What delusional drugs are you on?” Cameron replied.

Afterward, Parks, unfazed, talked about her own hopes for the project. “I don’t care what anybody says,” she told me. “Stick to the spirit of the play and you’re doing it right. It’s about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things.”

A few days later, we sat in the small yard behind her house in Venice, with her two pit bulls, Lambchop and Boogie-Woogie, and her cat, Hound Dog, amid bits of wooden deck furniture. The disorder in the yard was of a piece with the disorder in the house, whose ground floor included a long, narrow kitchen and a sprawling living room filled with dark chairs, couches, a big TV, and audio equipment—furniture that felt not so much arranged as left there. Posters from the Broadway production of “Topdog / Underdog” and from the Public Theatre production of “In the Blood” were hung outside Parks’s study, on the second floor. Inside were the framed telegram announcing her Pulitzer and a letter from James Baldwin, evaluating her work. Written in 1983, when Parks was a student at Mount Holyoke College and took an advanced fiction-writing class with the late novelist, it reads, “Susan Parks: An utterly astounding and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time.” “I got an A for that class,” Parks said proudly.

In addition to these written tributes, Parks had tacked up photographs of people she admires: Albert Einstein, William Faulkner, August Wilson. Of Wilson she said, “He never went to the theatre! And I asked him, ‘Brotha?’ And he says, ‘I didn’t grow up going to the theatre. I grew up reading books and listening to music, so going to the theatre wasn’t something that came naturally to me.’ And you can’t argue with August Wilson, because he makes such good sense. But it’s, like: Brotha! Get yo’ ass to a theatre.”

Pinned to a bulletin board behind the office door were a number of scribbled notes for future projects. In addition to working on the script for a musical based on “Ray,” the 2004 Oscar-winning movie about the late Ray Charles, Parks was composing lyrics for the songs that she performs on the college circuit, and outlining her second novel. (Her first, “Getting Mother’s Body,” was published in 2003.) Parks treats her notes as if they were missives from a dreamscape that she can revisit at will. And, like her dreams, Parks prefers to keep the genesis of her work as mysterious as possible. “Everything I write doesn’t appear to be biography until later,” she told me. “I often say that I’ve never written about anything I’ve experienced. Of course, that’s not true. But it doesn’t appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that’s because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn’t.”

In a sense, Parks’s rhythmic, repetitious, and poetic dialogue can be seen as evidence of her efforts to dig for the meaning of her own biography, which, out of a kind of artistic necessity, eludes her. “You know my dad died a couple of years ago?” she told me. (Her father, Donald Parks, suffered from Parkinson’s disease.) “Yeah, it was sad,” she added. “He was so sick and so sad, and sad, and sad. And all of that kind of thing.” Donald was born in Chicago, but as a lieutenant colonel in the Army he rarely stayed at one base for long, and Parks grew up in several places, including Fort Knox, Kentucky, where she was born, and Germany, where she attended junior high school. A tall, athletic man, Donald was generally reticent with his children (Parks has an older sister, Stephanie, and a younger brother, Donald, Jr., who is known as Buddy), except on a series of audiotapes that he recorded for them and sent home when he was stationed in Vietnam—some of the spirit of which Parks incorporated into her first successful play, “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,” which won an Obie for Best New American Play in 1990. In the play, Mr. Sergeant Smith, a father of three—Buffy, Muffy, and Duffy—is waiting to be photographed. He tells the unseen photographer less about who he is than about how he would like to appear: as a “correct” Negro who believes that his hard work for home and country will be justly rewarded:

This time tomorrow mm gonna have me my Distinction. Gonna be shakin hands with thuh Commander. Gonna be salutin friendly back n forth. Gonna be rewarded uh desk cause when uh mans distinguished he’s got hisself uh desk. Standin at the desk. My desk. Sssgonna be mines, anyhow. . . . Having a desk is distinguished. All of us have them. Because when there is danger from above, we stop. We look. We listen. Then we—dive underneath our desk. . . . Here—oh. I will sit. Hands folded. Here I am—no. Arms folded. . . . Ready? Hands on books and books open. A full desk and a smiling man. Sergeant Smith has got stacks of papers, but, not to worry, he is a good worker and will do well. Wait. Uh smile. Okay. Go head. Take it. Smiling at work. They like smiles.

The only character who struggles with Sergeant Smith’s representation of himself is his middle child, Muffy, who longs for a deeper emotional connection with her largely absent father. Shouting alternately at her mother, Mrs. Smith, and her sister, Buffy, Muffy proclaims, “He duhdn’t like me. Sergeant Smith dudhn’t like me Buffy. He only likes Mrs. Smith he only likes Buffy Smith he only likes his desk. He duduhn’t like Muffy. . . . If he really loved Muffy he’d say Muffy.” In her fierce attempts to have her name said out loud—to be acknowledged—Muffy exhibits much the same energy, the same refusal to be ignored, to be victimized, that has carried Parks forward in her career.

“Writers have a lot of power, and that might be why they’re not as respected as they should be,” Parks told me. “The first thing you do . . . you try to put them in their place. You try to convince them that they have no power. It happens to people of African descent all the time, too. Some other folks, they’re very intimidated by the power of the writer, just like some people are intimidated by the power that women have. So they have to make people feel shitty about themselves. People are intimidated by the power that black people have. So they have to make black people feel shitty about themselves. And it’s a lie. I can’t live that lie. And, if the lie is also being told in the theatre, I cannot participate in that lie. I refuse to perpetuate that lie, and I refuse to tell that lie.”

Parks’s mother, Francis McMillan Parks, is, according to the director Liz Diamond, “the kind of lady—a real Southern lady—who wears dotted swiss and gloves.” She grew up in West Texas, the first of six children of a college-educated black couple. (She currently directs a community-service program at Syracuse University.) She met her future husband at Southern University, an all-black college in Baton Rouge, in the early nineteen-fifties. Although Donald ended his career as a professor of education at the University of Vermont, he did not come from an educated family, which may explain the importance he placed on achievement. “My dad’s mom, Lucy, basically she scrubbed floors,” Parks told me. “She had a third-grade education. She would always say, ‘I didn’t have an education, but I have mother wit.’ ” It is her voice—as well as Francis’s West Texas locutions—that one often hears in Parks’s female characters. “My grandmother Lucy wouldn’t just say, ‘That ink is black,’ ” Parks recalled. “She’d say, ‘Ooooh! That sure is some black ink!’ ”

Although Parks insists on capturing the rhythmic intensity of her family’s speech in her plays, she has not always felt close to them. She has not seen her brother, Buddy, in ten years. “He used to come to my plays when I lived in New York, first starting out,” she said. “He’d hang out and drink beer. Talk to girls. Then he just . . . disappeared. He’s tall. Every time a tall brother comes into the room, I think it will be my brother. Once, I got an envelope from him. It contained a ticket stub from ‘Fucking A’ ”—Parks’s 2000 play—“and the receipt.”

As a child, Parks loved the books her parents gave her (she still cherishes a collection of Greek myths, as well as a long dialogue between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni), but she stopped aspiring to write after her high-school teacher in Maryland told her that she couldn’t be a writer because she couldn’t spell. “I grew up in a way and in a place where you just listened to your elders,” she told a college audience recently. “ ‘Ma’am,’ and all that. So it was, like, ‘O.K., Ma’am, I can’t be a writer because I can’t spell, because you’re the elder and you told me so.’ ” Parks put the notion aside for years, even as the ties between language and identity pushed and prodded at her imagination. “When we were living in Germany, I didn’t just feel like a black person,” she told me. “I felt like a person who couldn’t speak German.”

At Mount Holyoke, Parks first studied chemistry, and later switched to a major in English and German literature. Suddenly, she said, there were voices in her head that wouldn’t stop talking. And, once she started listening to them, she couldn’t stop writing. “I remember the first short story I wrote where I could actually hear voices,” she said. “It was called ‘The Wedding Pig.’ And it was about this family in Texas, and I could hear . . . it was the weirdest thing. I was sitting at my desk at Mount Holyoke, and I was typing as if they were standing right over there. And I kept thinking, If I turn around, they’ll leave. And I just copied down what they were saying. It’s been that way ever since.” She added, “Mr. Baldwin gave me the idea of being a playwright. I was writing short stories, but I would stand up when it was my turn to read and act all the voices out. He was, like, ‘Uh, Miss Parks, have you ever thought about writing for the stage?’ ”

Parks took the suggestion. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, in 1985, she enrolled at the Drama Studio London. “I don’t know what told me the best way I could learn to be a writer was by studying acting,” she said, but she was soon playing Puck in a student production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” She was also cleaning the school after class, to support herself. “I thought it was really lucky, because I didn’t have to have any papers,” she said. “Because I was just working for the school, basically. And, you know, school day is over and everyone goes to the pub and you stay behind and clean the toilets, vacuum.”

Back in New York a year later, she roomed for a while with the performer and writer Laurie Carlos, who, in 1976, was part of the ensemble of powerful black actresses who contributed to the success of Ntozake Shange’s historic play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Parks had met Carlos when she was still an undergrad and had a summer job at the Sojourner Truth Players, in Fort Worth. “We did a production of ‘For Colored Girls,’ which Laurie directed,” Parks recalled. “And I told her I wanted to come to New York after I graduated. And she said, ‘Well, mi casa, su casa—come on.’ She was the only one I knew in the whole city.”

In New York, Parks supported herself as a temp (“I am a proud graduate of the Betty Owen secretarial school,” she said) while working on her plays. The first to be produced was “Betting on the Dust Commander” (1987), which Carlos directed. Parks found a space and paid the actors and the director herself. “I was hanging out at the Gas Station”—a bar then on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—she said. “And you’d sit there and drink and look at the cement walls, and I was, like, to the guy who ran it, ‘Hey, man! Can I do a play here?’ And he was, like, ‘Oh, sure!’ They didn’t have any chairs. They hadn’t done a play in their life. I had never done a play in my life. We ran for three nights. My dad, my mom, and my sister, and one of the homeless guys from the neighborhood— that’s basically all the people who came. The lighting cues were ‘Lights up,’ ‘Lights down.’ There was an extension cord, which I still have to this day. ‘Lights up’ was plugging the extension cord in, and ‘Lights down’ was unplugging the extension cord. And it was my job to do it.”

On the advice of Alisa Solomon during that fateful subway ride, Parks sent her next play, “Imperceptible Mutabilities,” to Mac Wellman, who was the literary adviser of the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association Downtown at the time. “He sort of flipped, and sent it to me,” Liz Diamond said. “And I sort of flipped. And I met Suzan-Lori near Lincoln Center, and we talked and talked. I wanted it to be a trinity, not a play in four acts. She convinced me that the structure was right by writing and rewriting when something wasn’t clear.” Composed like a mosaic, “Imperceptible Mutabilities” is a series of dense scenes about black life from slavery to the present, linked by the metaphor of the natural sciences. In one monologue, a young woman talks about her childhood fascination with the TV show “Wild Kingdom.” As an adult, she works as a euthanasiast in an animal clinic. In another scene, three black women are studied, as if through a microscope, by a male scientist. These various closed-off worlds are like urgent messages that Parks has stuffed into bottles and cast into the sea of white America’s incomprehension—of women, of blacks, and of those who are both. “Imperceptible Mutabilities” premièred at the BACA Downtown Theatre, in 1989, when Parks was only twenty-six. Although the play was, at times, alienat-ing, the Times theatre critic Mel Gussow named Parks the year’s most promising playwright, noting, “Ms. Parks’s heightened, dreamlike approach is occasionally reminiscent of the work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange. . . . But there is substantial evidence of the playwright’s originality; ironically this occurs in a play that deals partly with the loss of identity. Ms. Parks’s identity as an artist is clear.”

Parks and the generation of African-American artists who came of age with her—among them the visual artists Glenn Ligon and Lorna Simpson—were born after Brown v. Board of Education. They made use of every bit of information to which they, unlike their parents, had access. Their work was indivisible from who they were—black, intellectual, sexual, “down” and sophisticated. These artists examined their European and African roots simultaneously, each contributing to a broader understanding of what it means to be an American. (The critic Greg Tate used the phrase “Cult-Nats meet Freaky Deke” to describe this trend.)

Parks, with her love of all language—from High German literature to black American speech—is a testament to this eclecticism. Of her next full-length work, “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World” (1990), an allegorical play about race and masculinity, which was also staged at BACA, she says, “Some of it’s not even English. It’s, you know, blah-blah-blah doin diddly-dip-da-drop. It’s just sound. It’s the sound of the dead, and the dead don’t make living sounds. But I had some great actors, and they would try anything.” Still, Parks has never been, solely, an experimentalist. She has an interest in the larger world, and in its larger audiences. “Black Man” was, in some ways, a transitional work for her. A more coherent piece than “Imperceptible,” it was also more willfully provocative, Parks’s attempt to stake a claim for herself within the discourse of race and gender studies. The play is a tribute to the many social and cultural visions of the black male, posing the question: If the last black man in the world were to die tomorrow, what would remain of him? (The play’s list of characters includes Black Man with Watermelon, Black Woman with Fried Drumstick, Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork, and Old Man River Jordan.)

In 1991, Parks became an associate artist at the Yale School of Drama. It was during that time that she began to conceive her next play, “Venus,” which was based, in part, on the life and legend of Saartjie Baartman, an African woman who, early in the nineteenth century, scandalized British and European spectators by flashing her pronounced derrière in various sideshows. “Venus” was the apotheosis of the themes that Parks explored in what she now calls her “B.P.”—or Before Pulitzer—work: the black female body as an object of fantasy, or of derision; the improvised family; history as a carny tent filled with barkers, illusionists, and confidence men; speech as an entirely subjective act; the essential loneliness of being. (“Oh God: Unloved,” Parks has Baartman cry at a pivotal moment in the play.) The playwright Tony Kushner wrote that “Venus” pushes “racial clichés and stereotypes out of the unlit mutterers’ corners and back to center stage, where the sight of them makes us wince.” Parks did not shy away from showing Baartman’s uglier sides, too; she deftly illustrated how Baartman was corrupted by her own fame, how the powerless end up identifying with their oppressors. Speaking of the Baron Docteur, the married lover who enslaved her, Venus says:

He is not thuh most thrilling lay Ive had but his gold makes up thuh difference and hhhh I love him.He will leave that wife for good and we’ll get married (we better or I’ll make a scene) oh, we’ll get married.And we will lie in bed and make love all day long.Hahahaha.We’ll set tongues wagging for the rest of the century.The Docteur will introduce me to Napoléon himself: Oh, yes yr Royal Highness the Negro question does keep me awake at night oh yes it does. . . .Every afternoon I’ll take a 3 hour bath. In hot rosewater. . . .They’ll rub my body with the most expensive oils perfume my big buttocks and sprinkle them with gold dust!Come here quick, slave and attend me!Fetch my sweets! Fix my hair!Do this do that do this do that!

The playwright George C. Wolfe had seen “Black Man” in Brooklyn, in 1990, and found himself intrigued. Already a successful playwright himself, thanks to his iconoclastic 1986 work “The Colored Museum”—which sent up Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Shange’s “For Colored Girls” in one scene alone—he saw in Parks’s writing, he told me, “unquestionably a non-clichéd, not-easy-to-digest vision of American history, black culture, the family, that was very complicated and smart and demanding. And a kind of voice that needed to be fed productions so that it could get better and smarter and grow.”

Parks told me that “1990 was like a brave-new-world kind of thing,” adding, “Everybody and their mama was telling me what they were going to do for me. And talk is cheap. I will love George C. Wolfe until the day I die. He was one of the only ones out of all those people who actually did something, who actually came through.” Wolfe became the artistic director of the Public Theatre in 1993, and Parks’s “The America Play” was one of the first shows that he produced there (with Diamond directing). In 1996, Wolfe agreed to take on “Venus” as well, and he asked Parks to consider working with the avant-garde director Richard Foreman. “George called me and said he wanted Suzan-Lori to work with someone who was smarter,” Foreman recalled, laughing. “I wasn’t sure about that, but I was certainly experienced.” By pairing Parks with Foreman at the Public, Wolfe was positioning her not only as a force in the experimental theatre but as an artist, it was hoped, who could draw a relatively large, racially mixed crowd.

Ever since the mid-sixties—when Amiri Baraka, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, had turned his back on the white downtown theatre community where he had made his name, in order to found the heavily politicized anti-white Black Arts Repertory Theatre, in Harlem, and then Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey—much of black theatre had seemed inaccessible to white audiences. But Parks was different. If she had any ideology at all, it was, as she wrote in her 1995 essay “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” not to allow the white oppression of blacks to constitute the central drama in her work. “The Klan does not always have to be outside the door for Black people to have lives worthy of dramatic literature,” she wrote. “Saying that ‘Whitey’ has to be present in Black drama because Whitey is an inextricable aspect of Black reality is like saying that every play has to have a murder in it, is like saying that every drama involving Jews must reference Treblinka.”

Parks was, in a sense, building a bigger house beyond the small rooms that another black female playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, had peopled with her characters. Kennedy had been working at the opposite extreme from the Baraka aesthetic since the early sixties. Not only were white characters not an issue in her unconventional plays; neither was the “real world.” Her characters lived in and for their own thoughts about history, myth, sexuality, and death. Yet, after Kennedy’s powerful benefactor, Joseph Papp, the Public Theatre’s founder, died, in 1991, interest in her work declined somewhat, and the city’s most important nonprofit theatre was left open to producers like Wolfe, who wanted to nurture younger experimentalists. Before long, Parks became, arguably, the theatre world’s great black hope.

Still, despite Wolfe’s best efforts, Foreman’s empathetic stage direction, and Adina Porter’s sensitive characterization in the title role, “Venus” received mixed reviews. Writing in the Times, Ben Brantley said, “Heaven knows that Ms. Parks . . . and Mr. Foreman . . . both have talent and originality to spare. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be married.” He concluded that “Venus” was “a protracted exercise in the obvious. It makes its points about racial and sexual exploitation firmly and early and then treads water in contorted postures for two hours.” Parks tended to share the critics’ views. Foreman, she said, was used to working on his own plays or on those of dead playwrights. “All I wanted for ‘Venus’ was, you know, a temperature, a pulse. It just seemed cold to me,” she said. Foreman, too, felt that the final result was “a little stiff” and “not my very best work,” a problem that he attributes partly to suggestions he received from the Public. Nevertheless, “Venus” carried Parks one crucial step closer to the theatrical mainstream. “Maybe one of the reasons ‘Venus’ is so haunting—and so important—is that it reflects what Suzan-Lori was becoming during the time she wrote it: a very powerful black female artist,” Diamond said.

In 1999, Wolfe took Parks to the Broadway première of Patrick Marber’s play “Closer.” “I’ll never forget it,” he told me, in his bright office in lower Manhattan, a few months ago. “At the end of the play, all the actors were taking their curtain calls and all the photographers rushed downstage to take pictures. And I saw this look on her face that read, in essence, ‘This will never happen to me.’ And that had a huge impact on me, because I thought, It should. Nobody should be locked out of the possibility. If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn’t be locked out of the room.”

Wolfe called several backers—including the San Francisco-based producer Carole Shorenstein Hays—and said, “Look, there has not been a play on Broadway by a black woman since ‘Colored Girls.’ ” By then, Parks had written “Topdog / Underdog.” Composed over four days, the play sprang from an idea that she’d had while she and her soon-to-be husband, Paul Oscher, a blues musician, were watching a game of three-card monte. As Oscher explained the tricks of the game to her, Parks began to think of a way to use them onstage. As she wrote, she was reminded of two characters she’d created for the opening scene of “The America Play.” One of them, a black man, made a living by donning whiteface to impersonate Abraham Lincoln in an arcade that allowed would-be John Wilkes Booths to “assassinate” him. For “Topdog,” she returned to the idea of a Lincoln impersonator, but instead of focussing on national tragedy she drew her characters closer, placed them in a room, and made it tremble with family grievances. In the resulting two-character, two-act work, Lincoln’s brother, Booth, resentful of Lincoln’s success, ends up shooting him for real. The play premièred at the Public in 2001, with Wolfe directing, and Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle in the starring roles. (Rehearsals were unorthodox from the start: Wolfe took some time to decide who should play Lincoln and who should play Booth; he had Wright and Cheadle read each part on different days. Wright ended up playing Lincoln to superb effect.) In 2002, Wolfe found a home for “Topdog” on Broadway. “When my agent called to tell me that we had the Ambassador, I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Parks says now. “I said, ‘The ambassador of what?’ ”

When the play opened on Broadway—with the actor and rapper Mos Def replacing Cheadle—Ben Brantley wrote, “Like ‘Invisible Man,’ . . . ‘Topdog / Underdog’ considers nothing less than the existential traps of being African-American and male in the United States, the masks that wear the men as well as vice versa.” By positioning Parks as a successor to Ralph Ellison, however, Brantley was missing a substantial point: the play owes much more to Parks’s mentor, James Baldwin, and to his novelistic examination of how race affects and sometimes destroys the relationship between brothers. In a sense, “Topdog” is also an open letter to Parks’s own absent brother, Buddy, and a farewell to the more hermetic approach she’d taken in “The Death of the Last Black Man,” twelve years earlier. Now she was playing less with the complication of language and idea than with the eruption of emotion in the characters themselves; some of the elements that had been so startling in her earlier work were more conventional and audience-friendly. Wolfe and Parks have since, more or less, parted ways artistically, and Parks is working on a screenplay for a film version of “Topdog” without him. (“She’s a complicated girl,” Wolfe says when asked about his former protégée.) Before the Broadway opening of “Topdog,” Parks also completed her first novel—“a novel in voices,” she calls it—which told the story of a black family living in Texas in the nineteen-sixties, and which owed a clear debt to Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” “I thought I was crazy,” she said recently. “But something told me to finish the book while we were in rehearsals for the play. So I would rush home after rehearsal and write the book until I had a draft. I’m glad I did, because the world then went woosh!”

Parks won a MacArthur “genius” grant shortly after “Topdog” closed at the Public. The Pulitzer came the following year, and Parks took some time away from New York, teaching at CalArts and working on screenplays. (She has written scripts for Spike Lee and Oprah Winfrey.) Still, she has never felt quite at home in California, or in its most popular industry. “It’s a great place to grow old,” she said of Los Angeles, which she may leave soon. “The weather’s nice, and it doesn’t snow, so you don’t have to worry about slipping. But I think what actually happens is that people grow older faster here, even though they spend so much money trying to look young, because they have to give up things that they really believe in.” She paused and considered. “I have this theory that the soul is like a lizard’s tail. If you pull it off, another one will grow back in its place. But repeated abuses will give you a lot of scar tissue. So there’s a lot of scar tissue around the soul. While it will always grow back, it doesn’t function as well.”

By last August, seven months after Metzgar and Parks had begun to dream up their ambitious production plan for “365 Days / 365 Plays,” the Public had signed on to be a “hub theatre” in New York, as had Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, Chicago’s Goodman and Steppenwolf Theatres, and Los Angeles’s Center Theatre Group, all of which would coördinate and oversee the project with smaller stages in their areas. Parks and Metzgar had attended theatre festivals and run a series of “town-hall meetings” in various cities, in order to promote and draw attention to “365”; these had attracted many theatre artists who supported the over-all goal of “365”: using the plays to connect theatres and audiences across the country.

One afternoon, a number of performers, including the Emmy-winning actress S. Epatha Merkerson, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Reg E. Cathay, sat at a long reading table in one of the Public’s darkened auditoriums. Parks wanted to hear the plays performed so that she could fine-tune the script for publication. Some of the plays are short dialogues or monologues, faithful renditions of the West Texas locutions that Parks loves. Others involve huge crowd scenes that would flood the stage. The final play consists entirely of stage directions. After reading through a piece about infanticide called “The News Is Here,” Cathay said, “Wow! That was from your dark period.” Rubin-Vega, who had appeared in Parks’s “Fucking A,” was delighted to discover that she was a character in another scene. “I’m in the Suzan-Lori canon!” she said. Looking at the date for one play, the actors realized that it had been written on the anniversary of September 11th, and paused for a moment. They seemed to treat the script as a diary of sorts, one through which they could recall not only national events but personal ones as well.

As they delighted in the big swoops of logic and talk that their roles required of them, Parks listened with the intensity of a court stenographer. What she was experiencing, she articulated a month later, at Northeastern Illinois University: “When you wake up, and look at your lover or husband, or whatever, that’s a way of honoring your commitment. But then you get out of bed and say another kind of prayer when you sit down at your desk. I wake up every day and say, ‘Yes! I’m a writer!’ When you make that commitment, all sorts of things move toward you.” ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, wrote the catalogue essay for the Robert Gober retrospective currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.